


A Gilded Cage

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied Torture, One Shot, implied dub-con, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:26:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel Matheson is good with practical things, good at carrying out plans, but she doesn't know how to fix her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Gilded Cage

Sometimes Rachel wished she could just go back. She lay awake at night, rocks digging into her bones, and thought about stealing into her gilded cage and locking the door behind her. Like a tame bird, too daunted by the open sky to fly. 

She could do it. Monroe would punish her – under the thin cover of her blanket her fingers crawled over her arms – but he wouldn't kill her. Not while there was use he could put her to. All she had to do was slip away from camp and walk until the militia found her. It would be easy.

Of course, she didn't. Abandon her children again? Crawl back to put her neck under Monroe's boot? There was a limit to how much she could hate herself and still walk, talk and pretend to function. So every morning she was still there when the sun rose, ready to spend another day as Rachel Matheson, rebel and adventurer-scientist.

_'We'll get power of our own,' she told Miles._

He nodded, dark, haunted eyes not quite able to settle on her face, because she already had power over him. Would Charlie forgive him if she knew the truth, all the grubby little corners of it? _('Why would you ask that?)_ Maybe, but she would never look at him the same again. She'd look at him like she looked at Rachel, with suspicion and resentment.

_'Don't tell me what to do. It's a bit late to play mother,' Charlie snaps, following after Miles like he was a lodestone._

At night, by the fire, she hovered over Danny, interrupting Rachel's hesitant attempts to speak to him. Danny let her, his suspicion sown over silver tableware and an underdone roast.

None of them want her here. Even Aaron, the bumbling jester of their little troupe, had a grudge against her for her role in turning off the power.

_'Why didn't you tell someone?' he yelled at her. 'We could have fixed it.'_

As if Google was the power player in this scenario, as if there wasn't someone out there with a switch they could have flipped at anytime. Search algorithms and a creative working environment were not the tools they needed to fix this mess.

Ben's mess, she thought with sour-tasting, petty spite. That was no good to her either. He was safely dead and martyred, beyond any attempt by Rachel to tarnish his halo. Even though this had all started with him.

Once upon a time she'd loved him, he'd given Charlie her frown and Danny his solid temperament. They used to sit in the garden at night, after the kids had finally gone to sleep, and held hands as they watched the stars.

It was gone now. She couldn't even be angry at him for taking up with the (equally dead, equally beatified) doctor Danny talked about. He'd deserved to be happy, it was just that Rachel could bear to give that to him.

_'Just leave him alone,' Charlie said impatiently when Danny had an asthma attack. 'I know what to do.'_

Rachel wishes she did. Give her something practical, give her something she could twist and fix with her long, competent fingers, give her the basic design and set her to work. Feelings, however, were not her strength. It wasn't that she didn't have them, they were just...low key (reserved, repressed, but what did pyschiatrists know anyhow?).

Except how can she fix this? Tell Charlie how Rachel had been the sacrifice to stop Miles burning everything they loved to the ground? About how he'd been going to let her go, but abandoned her instead because he couldn't hurt Monroe?

Or perhaps she should let them see her scars? The cords of keloids on either forearm, the gritty nodules of mended and mended and mended again bone on her ribs?

_Warm, callused fingers stroked her cheek. 'Don't touch her face,' Monroe said, sounding as if he was doing her a favour. 'If she ever gets to see her children again, we don't want her to scare them.'_

It would only hurt them, and it wouldn't help anyone but Rachel. So she held her tongue and kept her sleeves tugged down over the bony juts of her wrist-bones. She was determined and driven, playing the part they needed to see her in.

And at night she lay under her thin blanket and thought of feather light touches on her thigh and half-laughed admissions that he'd thought about this 'before'. Back when Monroe was Bass and thought Miles had gone too far. Maybe that was pathetic – she was sure her old psychiatrist would have called it unhealthy – but it for so long it had been the last kind touch she'd had.

At least it stopped her thinking of her gilded, bloody cage and how easy it would be to just...go back.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
